The Week that Was

One has to feel a little empathy for the Graniteville residents who are trying to save the latest park area to fall victim of the 20/20 Vision. But when we read the next day that ‘Hundreds’ are desperate for housing in the city, we have to salute Council’s aggressive stance on in-filling and making more lots available for affordable housing. Besides, with the building boom that must be following, our taxes may even go down. Sorry, but Graniteville children will have to play pot-hole hockey in the streets like everyone else.

While the city will be cashing in on the gasoline rebates from the Province and the Feds, the cost of operating everything from city trucks and buses to taxi cabs will follow the rise in the price at the pumps. It is the new reality – gasoline above a dollar a litre. And to the bozo who said he needed his Hummer or SUV to get around in winter – get a life – and a set of snow tires from CTC like the rest of us.

It was nice of the Dalton Gang to announce some needed funding for policing. Not that it had anything to do with the recent problems in Toronto, but we do seem to need more officers. But is this just another exercise in downloading? It seems police services around the province will get enough funding to hire new constables, but what happens next year? Will the local municipality have to increase taxes, again, to fund the people and equipment that this initiative begat? Perhaps it is time to get more annual provincial funding to beef up police services. Criminals do not recognize city boundaries – they move freely around the country with no regard for local taxes or taxpayers.

The lockout at CBC is most disturbing for regular listeners and viewers. I too, tried to listen to the banal banter on our local morning talk shows but just can not do it. Sixty –second news breaks may cover what is happening in North Bay, but we need to be informed better than that. Sorry, I forgot - this is the age of the sound byte. That session on how long should we shower surely pointed out how little regard many of us have for water and energy conservation. The canned crap the rest of the day has my radio turned off. I suppose I am saving a little on the cost of hydro.

And speaking of strikes and Hydro, was that our smiling councillor Bain manning the barricades in Toronto at the AMO session? One hopes that discretion will get the better of valour if the good councillor comes across any picket lines at home.

I truly feel sorry for the folk in Mattawa as their hopes for a hospital are slowly evaporating. For a government that cannot afford to finance a hospital in a city of sixty thousand people, there is little hope for smaller communities. Perhaps they should begin lobbying now for a couple of extra ambulances so they can transfer patients directly from their homes to North Bay. Where we will put them in larger vehicles and shuttle them to Sudbury or Toronto until 2009 when our hospital opens. If the doctor shortage isn’t addressed by then, the shuttle service will continue.

The softwood lumber problem is not going away. What we need is a change in how we determine hardwoods and softwoods. Real softwood is that stuff that grows in the south of the United States and is not suitable for building; Canadian softwood is tougher having been designed to support snow loading in the winters. Our softwood is really hardwood. If the Americans won’t buy the new ‘hardwood’ designation maybe we can compromise and call it hardy wood. To replace the ‘softwood’ we can downsize our latest crop of trees into stems and sell the leaves and limbs to the US. American workers might find nailing marijuana boards a little tricky at first but after a few days of experimenting with the by-products, they’ll get the hang of it. All those farmers up in the clay belt would be happy to ship a few transport loads of their product south. Knowing the Americans, they would likely try to put a tariff on the new softwood, but the market-up is higher and we could live with that, man.

The real election reform we need is to stop the politicians from lying during an election campaign but that is as likely to happen as the Leafs winning the cup. It does strike me as funny that our MPP can not believe the professionals who can analyze the election results and thoroughly understand proportional representation, yet she wants to talk to the people who used the system. What she will discover is that most people who voted in the last election wish they could do it over again and get it right. Happens here all the time. It might be cheaper for us to send these people on a junket to Cancun for a week and tell them to do a little reading on the subject. At least they could get a tan for our money.